Beethoven: A Heterogeneous Multi-Core Accelerator System Composer

Hardware Development is challenging in large part due to the complexity of incorporating realistic designs onto hardware devices (e.g., FPGAs, CGRAs, ASICs). This work proposes a multi-core, hardware-software accelerator design framework called Beethoven. Beethoven provides a flexible and reusable many-core accelerator System-On-Chip integration environment through programming abstractions for Register-Transfer Logic development, generation of software linkage between the host system and the accelerator, and provision of a host software runtime. We thoroughly evaluate Beethoven on microbenchmarks, MachSuite, and a compute-limited attention accelerator. We compare Beethoven generated accelerated system performance to High-Level Synthesis generated and hand-written RTL accelerators and show that Beethoven provides on-par or better-performing systems with marginal overheads. Beethoven is open-source and available at https://github.com/Composer-Team/Beethoven.